I know, you want to see pictures :/ But when I’m home, I’m playing Spore! I’ll put some up tonight. If you have Spore, you can see all my stuff by putting “tipadaknife” on your buddy list. I put Bildo and Darren on, and now I have some of their stuff trundling along in my world. It’s always fun to see a friendly face, though most of the stuff on the worlds I encounter are the things I made in Sunday’s game.

I started last night from the Tribal phase, on Normal mode, rather than Easy which I’d played the first time around. I doubt I will ever play the cell game again, and the creature phase, aside from seeing all the different creatures, was pretty boring as well. The Tribe phase, with its simple RTS, at least has some replay value.

My race was an evolved form of carnivorous cat. Where Sunday’s race was a kind of herbivorous rat/bird mix with violent tendencies, my prey-hunting Tribal Tabbies were as much interested in playing their didgeridoos as fighting. I allied myself with two tribes and was forced to destroy three others — one of which attacked me as I was trying to make peace. I marched into the last tribe’s village as a parade — my villagers playing wooden horns, maracas and didgeridoos as they filed in. I laid a gift basket of food down on their food store, serenaded them with my songs, and entered the Civilization phase in Economy mode.

You can’t build weapons in Economy mode. Your only option is to form trade routes with other cities and keep donating money to them until you can just outright buy the city. Only one opponent was economy (and I took that city quickly). The others were split between military and religious. While I had to keep paying ever-increasing bribes to keep out of war, they were having a merry old time lobbing bombs at each other and occasionally picking off one of my canine Poochinator cargo mechs. And of course all I could do was protest. Well, I did eventually ally with a military empire and paid them to go destroy a particularly annoying empire that kept sending planes to bomb my cities.

I wanted my ally’s cities in the worst way. I managed to get one through economic means, but the other just wouldn’t fall, so now that I had military power from the first of its cities, I used it to attack the other city, which gave me a port. I used my new ships that could actually fight back to clear the seas of all other shipping and take the offshore spice mines for my own.

By this time, the religious Red empire had pretty much taken over the second continent, save only for one cyan city, which hadn’t responded well to five hundred foot high holographic cats yelling sermons at them all day and all night.

Red and I had had some minor skirmishes, but had managed to avoid going to war. I opened up trade routes with two of its coastal cities, and then used my special ability to instantly purchase cities with whom you have trade routes to take them both. This gave me enough cities to use my game-ending power to purchase every city in the world, and so I entered Space phase as a Trader, which has similar powers. I can buy any planet with whom I have a trade route, but they want millions of Sporleons, more than I have at the moment, but once I do, I imagine the conquest of the galaxy will be just as quick as the conquest of the world was, once I got the city-buying power.

I’ve already encountered the empire of my species from the first game :)

Even at Normal level, the tribal and civilization phases were easy. Aggressors were more aggressive, but special moves like being able to outright purchase cities (or in military mode, nuke them from orbit) make it difficult to really get in trouble you can’t get out of. Being an economy civilization meant I was rich and could afford the sort of bribes to keep my city safe while I conquered my enemies by economic means.

I may restart the game once more to go the entirely social route and see how the religious empires work. They don’t get guns, either, so if they try to convert a military city, that city can just bring out some guns and shoot the sermonizers. I guess they might be able to make some headway against economy or other religious empires, though.

I’ll have a better review up in a day or two when I have played through more of the Galactic Conquest game, but basically, here’s what I thought of it.

The game is split into a bunch of stages, most of which are very short. You aren’t in the cell stage for more than half an hour — in fact, it’s really hard to slow things down much. I found it difficult as a herbivorous single-celled animal to find new parts, since I couldn’t kill other creatures for theirs.

You advance to the land creature stage after several evolutions with whatever parts you managed to find swimming in the primordial muck. Unless you always intended for your creatures to look like paramecium with legs, you’ll have to go looking for parts by killing things or waiting for other creatures to kill things and then go rooting around in the bones, depending on where you fall in the meat/plant eater spectrum.

If you’re a herbivore — which definitely ends up being the harder path in the creature stage — you can only advance by making friends with other animals, which means… challenging them to a dance-off.

No, really.

You are judged on your ability to sing, dance, look cute (charm), and pose. The parts you choose in the creature creator influence your ability to tear it up on the savannah dance floor. If you’re really good, you can get some creatures to join your pack, which gives hungry carnivores someone other than you to chew on when Step Up 4: Darwin U reaches its inevitable, disastrous conclusion.

You’ll probably just want to skip having to randomly build your creature from found parts and just use the full creator with all the parts. This leaves you without the Siren Song ability, which calms creatures and increases their receptiveness to your breakdancing.

Next up is tribal. Make your critters stand upright, and give them hands. This and the next few stages are real-time strategy stages. You can either kill all the other tribes, make peace with them, or kill some, ally with some. It’s a VERY simple RTS and goes by quickly. You can slow it down by doing side quests like taming wild animals (which gives an achievement), but there’s little point. How you play this stage sets up the next stage, a 4X (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate) Civilization-like game of worldwide conquest. If you killed every other tribe, you become a militaristic nation. I believe peaceful tribes become religious nations, but I’m not sure.

The vehicles you design in the Civilization will reflect your strategy in the Tribal stage. And the means with which you conquer other cities determine what you can do with them. I defeated half the enemy cities through military means (including one city I nuked because I was getting bored), and then made an alliance with the remaining superpower, and that was that.

It took about four hours to go from a cell swimming in goo to my first spaceship.

After that, the game started its real phase.

Spore is a galactic civilization game. Everything else is just a prologue to it. The first alien civilization I encountered was using my mechs (my land vehicles are giant cat mechs called Ratters — look it up on Sporepedia under tipadaknife) and my Flappers (a steampunk aircraft that looks like a duck swimming through the air). So I thought that was rude of them. I am in the process of conquering them now through economic means.

Is it fun? Well, it’s like any decent 4X game — it’s always just one more turn. Plus, you can design new vehicles and buildings for every new colony, so you’re in the vehicle and building creator all the time.

Spore is really just two games. One is the best introductory 3D modeling program I have ever seen, with support for sharing that is seamless and automatic — there were almost 8 million player created creatures, vehicles and buildings in the Sporepedia this morning. I was enjoying building my new colonies with vehicles and buildings way more twisted than anything I could come up with.

The second game is the Galactic Civilization game. If you like GalCiv or Master of Orion 2 or others of the genre, you will likely want to rush through all the other stuff to get to it. Or just play GalCiv. Well, Spore is somewhat different. You go from place to place and get quests, like kill five floozles on this planet, or investigate strange signals from that system, or mine this much spice and sell it to them over there. There’s also collection quests and a terraforming mini game.

The other stages go by so fast, you’ll miss them if you blink. Granted, I was playing on Easy.

It’s a decent game. For the time they spent, I would have liked to have spent more time in the tribal, RTS phase. Even the strongest opponents fell for the simplest trick — kill an enemy villager with spears, then run back to the home village and pick off enemy villagers as they follow you to retaliate. Leaving the home village so that enemies would send in their villagers to steal your food, and then rush in and burninate their less protected village also worked well.